Monday, July 25, 2011

Tomato on a WRT54G limited to 25 or so Mbps with QoS - use a faster router for higher speeds

This is a very specific post, if you couldn't already tell by the title - just a tidbit for anyone else curious and trying to make all the junk surrounding them in the world work for them instead of frustrate them.

If you have an internet connection of 25Mbps or less down, and you are using the wonderful tomato firmware on the works-pretty-good linksys/cisco WRT54G, you've been having a great time, things work wonderfully and they will continue to work wonderfully.

However, if you like me use Comcast high-speed internet and your area gets the infrastructure upgrade from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3 you'll find that you have 50Mbps of bandwidth available, and you might opt for that plan.

At that point you'll realize that tomato running QoS on a WRT54G can't keep up with more than 25Mbps so you won't get all the speed you want.

Never fear though, the works-pretty-well and slightly-newer WRT310N can handle it, and the almost-as-pretty but just-as-functional DD-WRT firmware does the job nicely if you follow the instructions well.

And just for another random tidbit from my life of trying to make things work today, if for any reason you attempt to use a Thule Rapid rail / aero cross bar with their Prologue bike rack, you'll need four more grade 8 1/4" washers per bike rack to get the bolts secure on the aero bar, but the instructions aren't aware of that and they don't give you the extra washers. Great rack, bad instructions, bad testing, Thule. Shame!

Interesting - thanks for the comment. Did DD-WRT on the WRT54G work for you, allowing you to get full 50Mbps throughput on the line? I had a WRT310N laying around so I didn't even bother trying to push the old hardware with it, I just threw the 310N at it (and since tomato isn't supported on it I don't think, went with DD-WRT at the same time). Others may benefit from knowing that the WRT54G + DD-WRT combo is capable though (with or without QoS)

I think it had more to do with the CPU on the WRT54G just not being powerful enough - that's why I was curious if it worked for you. My assumption was that neither tomato nor DD-WRT was going to work which is why I went with the 310N...I don't think tomato has any problems except it doesn't support the 310N model for whatever reason (and it's obsolete anyway, so bugging them for it seems pointless for them...)